West-Central New Mexico
This section is a complex and colorful mass of landforms scattered helter-skelter across the western part of the state. It stretches from the green Rio Grande Valley, with its irrigated lands, quaint farms, and picturesque agricultural villages, up the Valley’s steep western slopes to the rolling grassland and mesas and alluvial fans, ending in precipitous and treacherous canyons in the rugged mountains. Socorro Mountain, the Magdalenas, the San Mateos, the Ladrones, and countless others seem always to ring the horizon. Some of them are timbered and abound in cool, refreshing shade and springs; some are harsh and dry. In the west, the famed San Agustin Plains stretch to the sunset, a wide carpet fringed by black, timbered hills, site of fabulous cattle drives of a bygone day. The complexity of the region’s geology, scenery, and terrain is matched by an equally complex history.
The history is a mosaic of many hues, some harsh and stark like its dry desert mountains, some inviting like the shade and coolness of its timbered canyons and mountain springs. First were the many diverse and sometimes hostile Indian cultures. There were peaceful pueblo peoples tilling their lands, using the Rio Grande’s flowing water to produce abundance. Also, prehistoric village dwellers struggled to create agricultural societies along the banks of now-dry rivers in the western part of the region. And there were the fearsome Apache Indians who founded their homes in the broken mountain fastnesses and added their excitement and tragedy to the mosaic. So, too, did the Spaniard make his mark and the Mexican who followed close behind. The place names of the eastern part of the region are primarily Spanish, although the Spanish found the area a difficult one in which to maintain themselves. And then the American came to dominate this land, adding realism and technology.
Finally, two major economic factors left a profound imprint: stock raising and mining. The first began with the Spanish, was continued by the Mexicans, and commercialized by the Americans. Everywhere are signs of this heritage. Mining also played a dominant role, although of a shorter duration. One can hardly lift his eyes to the hills without seeing signs of the prospectors shovel or the miner’s work. One can hardly converse with local citizens without discussing mines of the past or mines of the future. Livestock and minerals, then, are woven through the historical pattern and are never far from any part of the story.
Let the traveler be aware of several important facts when he passes through this region. First, this is empty country, an area that has fewer people now than it had eighty years ago. Its mines are mostly closed and the towns that grew with the mines are ghosts. One of the most famous of these is the town of Kelly, a short distance from the community of Magdalena. Another is Mogollon, off U.S. Highway 180 in the southwestern part of this region. Either of these will give to the viewer a vivid picture of the mining camps of the nineteenth century.
To the average tourist crossing the San Agustin Plains, they seem desolate and uninteresting. To the traveler with imagination and knowledge of the history of this once great inland lake, the trip can be exciting. He pictures this great basin full of water, forty-five miles long and fifteen miles wide, and sees mountains covered with blue spruce surrounding the great lake. His mental motion picture rolls on thousands of years, watching the water evaporate and the forest of spruce die, to be replaced eventually by the piñon and juniper now dotting the hills. Grass grew in the old lake bed, except in the last areas to evaporate, for these had an alkali content too high for most grasses. The traveler then watches the Indian enter the scene—not the pueblo builder, except as a transient, for no water is available. The nomadic warrior uses the pathway later. In 1774 and in 1776, he sees several important battles between the Spanish and the Apaches fought on these Plains. Later, the American cattleman dominates them, as he does today....
And so the mosaic grows—Indians, Spanish, Americans, cattle, and mines—and the spectacular vistas and the vast emptiness add color and excitement for the traveler who sees the past with the present.